As graceful as sculpture, yet packing enough power to
pierce armor, the recurved bow was the top cavalry weapon of pre-industrial
Asia. Over centuries, Arab, Persian and Turkish bowyers learned to join wood,
horn and sinew and to shape bows with tips that "recurved" forward. The results
were compact enough to be used with accuracy from a galloping horse. Now,
American bowyer Lukas Novotny is try to find out how they did it.

An unfinished bow rests in the grip of a vise
in a workshop near the small town of Grand Rapids, Ohio. On a nearby work table
is a litter of sanding blocks, large-toothed metal combs, wads of steel wool,
rolls of masking tape, wrenches, chisels and files. From a pipe overhead hangs a
stalactite of orange-tipped clamps. In the center of the chaos sits Bubba, a
longhaired gray cat with a body as massive as his appetite for attention.

It is here, under Bubba’s watchful eye, that
Lukas Novotny is crafting what he hopes will be a bow "in which superlative
performance is combined with an unsurpassed grace and beauty … lightness and
hardiness"—the dream of modern bowyers. Trained as a glass artisan in the former
Czechoslovakia, Novotny emigrated to the United States in 1982; jars of colorful
pieces of glass crowd the shelves behind him. Among them, though, are the
materials of his present career: a curl of buffalo horn protruding from a top
shelf, a slim quiver bristling with arrows standing nearby and, directly in
front of the shelves, racks full of row upon row of bows. A slim 32 to 76
millimeters wide (1¼ to 3'') but ranging up to 132 centimeters long (52''), they
extend as gracefully as a ballerina’s arms.

These are Novotny’s reconstructions of Asian
composite recurved bows, so named because they are composed of several materials
and because, when strung, the curve of the limbs reverses at the tips. Elegant
and light, they are masterpieces of engineering, contemporary products of an
ancient craft that has, time and again, changed the course of history.

Like most great inventions, the composite
recurved bow was the culmination of a long technological evolution. Humans had
been hunting and warring with simple wooden bows for more than 30,000 years
when, about the third millennium BC, bowyers from Mesopotamia to Japan
independently began experimenting with ways to enhance their bows’ springing
action by introducing other materials: They applied horn to the side of the bow
facing the archer, the side in compression when the bow is drawn, and they
applied animal sinew to the outward side, which is in tension. In the process,
they reduced the wooden element of the bow to a slim core whose sole role was to
keep the sinew and the horn aligned.

The next development was the discovery that,
by training the tips of the bow’s limbs to curve forward, in the opposite
direction of the draw—the "recurve" of the recurved design—both the power and
the accuracy of the bow could be increased still more, though at the cost of
making it harder to draw. And over the life of the bow, as it gradually lost its
spring action, the bowyers found that reheating its limbs and gently restoring
its original curve also restored its original power.

Asia’s long-standing preference for the bow
over the sword, mace and other weapons favored by Europeans up through the 15th
century is credited with helping shape and reshape the political boundaries of
the Old World. In 546 BC, Persian archers overcame Lydian mounted lancers and,
in battles against Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks, they often prevailed over
the opposition’s infantry. Much later, in a famous conflict between the Roman
army and the Parthians in 64 BC, it was what military historian E. G. Heath
called "the never-failing quiver" that thwarted the eastward advance of the
Roman Empire. It was not that the Romans ignored archery—they simply considered
it of secondary importance and thus failed to perfect archery equipment or
tactics. The Byzantines, on the other hand, valued archery, and this had
something to do with the fact that Byzantium outlived the Roman Empire by about
1000 years. When its fall began with the battle of Malazgirt in 1071, it was to
the Seljuk Turks, who were true masters of the bow.

Every historical work on archery speaks of
the legendary Persian archer said to have shot an arrow through a
five-centimeter (2'') thickness of brass, and of Ottoman Sultan Selim III who,
in 1788, personally set a still unsurpassed distance record of 888.80 meters, or
963 yards—farther than the best modern bow can shoot. In literature, the bow
became associated with great heroes as a virtual extension of their bodies—an
idea that is not in fact farfetched, since the archer, in drawing the bow,
transfers energy from his body into the body of the bow, where it is stored
until he releases it to the arrow. Rustem, the hero of Firdawsi’s 11th-century
Persian epic the Shahnama (Book of Kings ), thus literally
uses his final breath to shoot his enemy through the heart.

In Islam, too, the bow holds a special place.
It is the weapon the Archangel Gabriel handed down to Adam, the one God
commanded the Prophet Muhammad to use. Some 40 hadith ("traditions," or
recorded sayings and stories about the Prophet) focus on archery as a way to
strengthen both body and soul, and while some hadith encourage metaphorical
interpretations, others led to the establishment of archery instruction as
fundamental to physical fitness. In 1835 the Ottoman ruler Mahmud II had both
aspects in mind when he commanded his courtier Kani to set down in writing all
available information about archery. He was doing this, he announced, "so that
under my royal patronage novices may acquire complete knowledge of the sunna
[the example] of the Prophet, and by diligence come to possess the degrees of
both worlds."

Two hadith specifically mention the Arab bow,
commonly interpreted as referring to a composite bow—though some scholars
believe that the earliest Muslim warriors from the Arabian Peninsula used simple
bows until they gained the know-how to construct composites from conquered lands
such as Syria. Indeed, a bow considered to have belonged to Muhammad, now in
Istanbul’s Topkapı Museum, is made of bamboo. Nevertheless, by the time the
hadith were codified in the eighth century, the bow used by Muslims had long
been the composite bow, in which the wood was said to correspond to bone, the
horn to flesh, the sinews to arteries and the glue to blood.

Just as each of these tissues plays a
different role in the workings of the body, each of the bow’s elements has a
similarly specific function. "The sinew takes the tension," Novotny explains.
"The horn on the belly takes the compression, and in the middle, the wood takes
the shear stress. It’s a simple premise, but if you don’t get the details
right," he warns, "you’ll have problems." After all, when drawn, the bending
portions of the bow bear some 175 kilograms of pressure per square centimeter
(2400 lb/sq in). If the belly cannot stand the compression, it buckles, and if
the back of the bow cannot bear the stretch, it pulls apart. "At first," Novotny
confesses, "most of the bows I made broke."

Early bowyers no doubt experienced similar
failures in the development of recurved composite designs, but thanks to trade
in peacetime and the capture of weapons in wartime, technology was rapidly
diffused as bowyers over wide areas influenced each other. "The cultural
exchange was incredible," Novotny says with enthusiasm. "We have an idea of what
a typical bow from each culture looked like, but at the same time, there could
be any variation in between."

While Persians, Parthians, Turks, Mongols,
Mughals and others all had highly developed traditions, most archers today
consider Turkish bows of the late 1700’s and 1800’s to be the high-water mark of
the Asian composite bow. After that time, firearms began to dominate the
battlefield, fewer and fewer people had time for archery as sport, and the
bowyer’s art declined. "There were probably a few people alive who knew how to
make composite bows until World War II," Novotny speculates. "But unfortunately,
nobody in Turkey today, at least to my knowledge, knows how to build them. It
took only one generation to lose the knowledge entirely."

The desire to recover and rediscover that
knowledge has turned into an all-consuming passion for Novotny, who over the
last decade gradually gave up glass to dedicate himself full-time to researching
and making bows professionally. He began by reading a book on North American
bows and, being an avid horseman himself, tried his hand at making the short
horn-and-sinew bows that Plains Indian tribes used for hunting buffalo. "But
always in the back of my mind," he says, "was the history I grew up with in
Czechoslovakia—of Turks invading Europe and besieging Vienna."

He said as much to bow expert Tim Baker, whom
he met by chance in California in 1992, a time Baker remembers as "the zenith of
the reconstruction of Asian composite bows." Their aficionados, he adds,
laughing, were "one of the smallest minority groups in the universe."

What the group lacked in numbers, it more
than made up for in dedication, as Novotny discovered when Baker put him in
touch with Jeff Schmidt, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin. For two
years, Schmidt too had been researching Asian composite bows, and he was well
known in archery circles for his extensive library of books in English, Russian
and Persian and his files bulging with thousands of photocopied papers. But more
than that, Novotny says, "he had all the technical know-how."

Like Novotny, Schmidt had started out reading
books, scouring bibliographies and tracking down every piece of writing he
thought might contain useful information. One discovery was a book published in
London in 1970, Saracen Archery: An English Version and Exposition
of a Mameluke Work on Archery, in which authors J. D. Latham and W. F.
Paterson explicate a 14th-century Arabic treatise in verse titled Kitab
Ghunyat at-Tullab fi Ma‘rifat Ramy al-Nushshab, loosely translated as
Essential Archery for Beginners . The text had been written at a time when
the Mamluks had convincingly demonstrated the prowess of their archers by
repelling the Mongol assault on Egypt and Syria in 1260. It provided basic data
on bow construction, supplemented with information gleaned from other early
texts and with observations derived from the author’s own experimentation.

Saracen Archery
showed that the wooden core of the composite bow was made of five elements: the
handle in the center, two limbs (dustars) on either side and the curved
tips (siyahs) that are either attached to or made as part of the
dustars . In either case, the tips do not flex; they taper sharply to the
nocks, where the string is attached. In many bows, the siyah simply extends the
curve of the dustar, but early bowyers introduced the famous recurve that gave
the bows their familiar, wave-like shape, their greater capacity for tension and
their greater power. These were the bows that Novotny wanted to build.

To make the core, Novotny selects pieces of
American hard rock maple, the closest match he can find locally for the
fine-grained maple favored by Turkish bowyers. Like them, he carves the handle
into a gently rounded form, oval in cross-section, that fits comfortably in the
hand, the fingers curling around the swell and back toward the palm. To provide
a firm grip, however, the handle must not be so small that the fingers reach
around to the palm—that would create, in effect, a bearing in which the bow
could swivel.

Most bows made with dustars and siyahs as
single elements are Turkish. To make them, Novotny cuts 76-centimeter (30'')
sections of wood and soaks them in cold water for three days. Then he steams the
two pieces into curves of some 60 degrees. For bows in which the dustars and
siyahs are separate elements, typically known as Persian five-element bows, he
steams the dustars into a gentle curve and finds branches growing at the desired
angle for the siyahs. To assemble the parts, he tapers both ends of the handle
and, if needed, the ends of the siyahs. He then cuts V-shaped splices into the
dustars and, after brushing on glue, fits the pieces snugly to form a strong,
undetectable joint.

Next comes the horn; Novotny uses
water-buffalo horn. He prepares it by shaving off the surface ridges, cutting it
roughly to size, then steaming and flattening it. He can now shave the horn
until he has twin strips of uniform thickness the width of the wood core. He
glues the horn strips onto the bow’s belly so they meet in the center of the
handle. Then he winds a rope around the bow using a traditional tool called, in
Turkish, a tepelik . Unlike modern clamps, the tepelik creates
an even pressure along the curve, squeezing out excess glue. The bow is now left
to dry for several weeks with its ends tied to maintain a soft curve.

The sinew requires even longer preparation.
Novotny buys whole tendons from a slaughterhouse and here departs from tradition
in that he uses acetone to degrease them instead of the highly carcinogenic
naphtha that was used in the past. But he does so only because both are equally
effective. "If the glue joint has a speck of grease on it," Novotny explains,
"it’ll fail, because grease and glue do not mix, and there will be a speck where
there is no glue." In highly stressed bows, an unglued speck is enough to
introduce a fatal weakness.

Once the sinew is dry, Novotny breaks it up
with his fingers and combs through it with a metal brush. The sinew is now a
mass of long, thick fibers, which he dips in hot hide glue before laying them on
the bow. "I use five different lengths of sinew," he explains. "Through the
bending portion, you always use the long fibers; the shorter pieces are for
building up around the handle area and along the sides, and they get overlapped
and staggered like bricks."

He applies the sinew in two or three courses,
each containing three to four layers. After the first course, he lets the bow
dry a couple of weeks to allow the sinew to shrink. As the fibers shorten, they
force the limbs to curve in on themselves, a process Novotny encourages by tying
a string between the siyahs and twisting it as the sinew contracts. This is the
beginning of a process that ultimately gives the bow its strength: It is
tantamount to instilling the memory of a particular curve into the fibers of the
horn, sinew and wood so that, when Novotny later bends the bow in the opposite
direction to string it, every cell of the bow will want to spring back. The
tension increases when Novotny pulls the bow into full draw, so that upon
release the bow’s fibers snap back, unleashing an explosion of energy.

But before that happens, there is still much
to do. Novotny applies a second course of sinew, after which he again dries the
bow, this time in a heat box. When the limbs are malleable, he reflexes them
even more sharply, tying the siyahs so close together they almost touch. After
laying the final course of sinew, he follows the same procedure, this time
crossing the limbs all the way over the center until the bow looks like a
pretzel. "Then you leave it in that form for about a year, minimum. You see," he
explains, "hide glue only reaches its full strength after 10 years."

By now the bow has been curved so much that
the two pieces of horn on its belly no longer meet in the center of the handle.
Novotny cuts a sliver of hardwood or bone—"can’t use ivory any more"—and inserts
it in the tiny gap. Finally, he covers the sinew side with strips of white birch
bark that have been soaked for a year in seawater. Sometimes he uses leather
instead,and often he paints on it a decoration appropriate to the type of bow he
has made. Jeff Schmidt, on his bows, took this a step further, learning Persian
in order to select appropriate verses of poetry to decorate his bows.

From the time Novotny cuts the wood to the
day he declares a bow complete, a year and a half has usually elapsed, some of
it spent testing the bow, adjusting it, and testing it again. He is often seen
astride his horse, bow in hand, and at least twice a day he steps outside his
studio to shoot arrows into stacked bales of cornhusks. The setting in rural
Ohio is so bucolic, and Novotny’s gestures so assured, that every step looks
self-evident, straightforward, easy. Yet nothing could be more deceptive. With
no master bowyer to guide them, archers today have had to learn from bows in
museums and from old texts, neither of which tell a complete story.

A composite bow can only reveal its full
range of secrets if you take it apart, and for the best bows, invariably in
museums and private historical collections, this is clearly not an option.
Neither is stringing old bows and testing them, since there is no way to assess
whether or not they could now withstand the tension. While damaged bows can be
taken apart without as many qualms, they yield information only about the final
product, and thus there is little to help understand the process. As for the
texts, they focus mostly on shooting techniques, and the chapters on
construction often prove to be mixed blessings: In some cases, the author was
not a bowyer himself and thus did not always understand what the bowyers were
telling him. In other cases, the author assumed knowledge that has long
disappeared. And like any skilled craftsmen, Novotny points out, bowyers guarded
their secrets.

For example, for all its precise pointers on
assemblage and materials, Saracen Archery does not provide exact
dimensions for bows. Its units of measurement are not standardized, and many of
the proportions are expressed in terms of a man’s anatomy, yet there is no
telling just what size that man is.

When Jeff Schmidt, who stands nearly two
meters tall (6' 6''), built a bow using measurements based on his own body, it
had a "preposterous" draw of 90 kilograms (200 lb): It was impossible to draw.
This is because doubling the thickness of the bow increases its stiffness by a
factor of eight.

Undeterred, Schmidt kept searching. He found
in the second edition of Paul Ernest Klopsteg’s self-published 1947 book
Turkish Archery and the Composite Bow not only the findings Kani compiled
for Mahmud II, but also the results of Klopsteg’s 15 years of experimentation,
which yielded dimensions that "actually worked." Then Schmidt heard about a
bowyer named John McPherson, a Kansan who was making highly recurved Native
American bows of horn and sinew. Schmidt spent a summer with McPherson learning
the ways horn and sinew behave. By trial and error, Schmidt refined his bows’
proportions and determined which materials worked best: The Achilles tendons
from cattle, he discovered, provided the best sinew, and water buffalo provided
the best horn—even though some texts recommended goat and antelope.

It was just about this time, in the fall of
1992, that Novotny showed up on his doorstep with "some really good North
American Indian bows," says Schmidt, who confesses he was "shocked and
disappointed because mine were so crude by comparison."

By now, Schmidt recalls, "there was a network
of about 20 people working on this. We called each other about once a day." It
is impossible to chronicle how this geographically diffuse, informal "bowyer’s
club" solved each problem its members encountered, but one example imparts their
experience of collaboration and dedication. The question was how best to glue
the horn to the wood. Fish-bladder glue, they knew, is stronger than hide glue,
but according to some texts, Turkish bowyers favored glue made from the roof of
a sturgeon’s mouth, not its bladder. When this proved unsuccessful, the bowyers
decided there might be some ambiguity—intentional or not—in the texts. So, it
was back to simmering fish bladders at 65 degrees Celsius (150° F). But these
results, too, proved unsatisfactory. "Someone in the group called a chemist in
New York who made hide glue," Schmidt recalls. "And the chemist told us that the
molecular weight of the fish-bladder glue was high and it was therefore
difficult for it to penetrate into horn." The solution was to dilute the
stronger fish glue with the weaker but more penetrating hide glue.

Now they faced another conundrum: How thick
should the glue line be? Too thin and the seal might not hold. Too thick and the
seal might rupture. Enter Wayne Alex, an Alaskan bowyer who knew a collector who
had X-rayed bows and reported that the wood and horn bore minute longitudinal
grooves. As Novotny subsequently discovered, this grooving is sometimes light,
just enough to roughen the surfaces. But on shorter bows that are more highly
stressed, the grooving runs deeper, increasing the contact surface for the glue
by some 40 percent.

Schmidt set about constructing scrapers of a
type Novotny still uses. Some have short, triangular teeth, with which he
roughens up the wood and horn. Others have longer teeth, five to eight per
centimeter, with which Novotny scores the horn and wood. It is this "hand
control," he says, that Schmidt most admires in Novotny’s work. "Lukas," he
says, "is by a long shot the most technically skilled when it comes to
fabrication."

Today, Novotny also stands out as one of the
rare few to remain dedicated to uncovering the secrets of the earliest composite
bowyers. While Baker, Schmidt and others have since turned to other pursuits,
Novotny has imparted what he knows to engineer Tony Horvat, with whom he
established Saluki Bows. To support his passion for traditional bows, he makes
and sells less labor-intensive bows of fiberglass and other modern materials.
And he continues to research. About four years ago, after examining the
cross-section of a bow in a German museum, Novotny changed the shape of his
composite bows’ cores from flat to rounded, and he built up the sinew at the
ends. More recently, he tracked down a copy of an out-of-print Turkish book on
archery whose author recently died but whose papers and source materials Novotny
believes might be available through his daughter.

He also remains committed to replicating as
exactly as possible the materials Persian and Turkish bowyers used. He puzzles
over recurring references in texts to the use of neck sinew: Nobody here has
been able to make it work. "A truck driver from Florida read an article about me
and called to tell me his grandfather taught him to make bows in the 1920’s in
Istanbul. He kept mentioning sinew from the neck. Is it faulty memory?" Novotny
wonders. "Or is there really some way to use this sinew?" And just as he hunted
down a supply of suitable water-buffalo horn in Thailand three years ago, he
wants one day to find the exact kind of maple described by Kani and others.

Baker, however, considers such concern over
materials "mythologized." Materials, he maintains, "only account for 10 percent
of the bow’s success"—the rest is design. But while Novotny agrees that design
is paramount, he remains curious and respectful of the centuries of experience
that went into determining just the best time to cut the sapling and even on
which side of a hill to grow it. "I have made some very strong bows," Novotny
says, "but I still think I can make them perform much better if I really attain
the right materials."

Until then, the quest for the modern
equivalent of the recurved composite bows that shaped centuries of history
continues, "as much a frustration as a passion."

Lee Lawrenceis a free-lance writer specializing in the cultures of Asia. She lives in
Washington,D.C.

David H. Wells
(www.davidhwells.com
) is a free-lance editorial, commercial and documentary photographer living
in Providence, Rhode Island. He recently completed an Alicia Patterson
Fellowship project photographing the emerging middle classes in India.

Bow Facts
and Types

Simple bows
("self-bows")
are what most people think of when they think of bows. Some 30,000 to 40,000
years ago, humans took a strip of wood and tied its ends together with a
taut string to create the first weapon that could store energy. The premise
is simple: The archer pulls back on the string, drawing the bow to a smaller
radius curve. When the archer lets go of the string, the energy stored in
the bow transfers to the arrow, casting it faster and farther than the
archer’s hand could throw it.

Longbows
are made of one or more pieces of wood—typically yew, osage or black
walnut—and they are as tall or taller than the archer. The strongest are
powerful enough to shoot an arrow through a plate of armor at 365 meters
(400 yds), though their more typical range is about half that. To shoot a
longbow with accuracy requires great skill and strength. Easy to reload, the
longbow was reputedly Robin Hood’s weapon as he roamed Sherwood Forest in
the 1200’s, and it later dominated the battlefields of northern Europe from
1300 to 1500, credited among other things with assuring victory to the
British against the French in 1346 at the Battle of Crécy and again in 1415
at Agincourt. The disadvantage of a longbow is that its size requires that
the archer be on foot: It is almost impossible to shoot a longbow while
riding a horse.

Composite bows
are typically made of wood, horn and shredded animal sinew. They can pack
the same power as a longbow but in a smaller, lighter form usable by a
mounted archer.

Recurved composite bows
are the most powerful, compact design known. The recurve refers to the tips
that curve forward, in the direction of the shot. Each variation of the
recurved composite design—Persian, Turkish, Indian or Mongol—excels in a
particular area: The Persian bow, for example, trades distance for power;
the Turkish bow sacrifices accuracy for distance. Some recurved composite
bows use other materials: The Chinese bow, for example, is made with a
bamboo core covered with strips of young bamboo on the back (in place of
sinew) and dried, year-old bamboo on the belly.

Crossbows
are mounted in a metal frame equipped with a crank, which gives the archer a
mechanical advantage in drawing the bow. Though it shoots with great power
and accuracy, its long "reloading time" made it more useful in sieges than
in battles. Crossbows were developed and used in Europe in the 11th to 15th
century, and Europeans also deployed them in the Middle East during the
Crusades.

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